Kaspersky Lab Granted New Patent in the US Covering Malware Protection Using Virtualization

31 Jan 2012Product news

Kaspersky Lab, one of the leading developers of secure content and threat management solutions, announces that it has been granted a new patent in the USA. Patent № 8099596 covers a “System and Method for Malware Protection Using Virtualization”. The patented technology was developed by Vyacheslav Rusakov and Alexander Shiryaev.

The ever-increasing popularity of Internet services like online banking and shopping and social networking has brought about an increase in the amount of sensitive data stored on computers and used by client applications. At the same time the number of cyber-threats specially designed to steal user data has also increased - dramatically. As a result, improved security measures are needed in the form of extra layers of protection. One possible solution in this regard is launching an application in a virtual environment, otherwise known as a “sandbox”.

Existing sandboxing technologies simply protect a computer system from infection; however, the newly patented technology allows for safe functioning of an application even if the computer system is already infected. Such safe functioning is achieved by intercepting system calls addressed to an object of a protected application and analyzing whether the system call is allowed or not allowed to be executed.

If no malicious activity has been found during execution, it is then possible to transfer the changes from the virtual environment to the host system.

At present Kaspersky Lab has been granted 49 patents covering its advanced technologies in Russia, 42 in the United States, one in Europe and one in China. Another 35 patent applications are currently being examined by the patent office of Russia, 45 - by the patent office of the United States, 37 - of Europe, and 23 - China.